I am afraid I disagree with this, though I wish it were so. We merely need to look at how the GI Bill after WWII helped Whites go to college but did not help Blacks. My father went to college and so did all my brothers. He was the first and we followed. Blacks were systematically excluded from southern colleges since post WWII Jim Cr…
I am afraid I disagree with this, though I wish it were so. We merely need to look at how the GI Bill after WWII helped Whites go to college but did not help Blacks. My father went to college and so did all my brothers. He was the first and we followed. Blacks were systematically excluded from southern colleges since post WWII Jim Crow was still the standard. So Blacks simply lost out on generational benefit of advanced education and consequent wealth. https://www.militarytimes.com/military-honor/salute-veterans/2019/11/10/the-gi-bill-shouldve-been-race-neutral-politicos-made-sure-it-wasnt/
The problem with this is there is still a generalization being made based on ancestry or the past. You don't have to do any generalizing at all -- you can look at the current status of people based on socioeconomics and base policy on that. If you simply generalized, you may never guess that the county with the worst male life expectancy in America around 2015 was McDowell County in West Virginia, which is overwhelmingly a white majority county. It doesn't matter a whole lot to me how people got to that status over time -- there are many forces including state sanctioned racism, yes, but other facts that led to people's current status, and we should be wary of measures that would point to the past but ignore the present.
Charles Murray makes this point splendidly in his book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. I do not disagree on this point at all. White working class America is absolutely collapsing in despair. Deaths of despair across rural white America, as Sinchan below writes, are horrifying. I live in Southwestern PA, I see it daily. My only point is race also matters. And we need policies that correct the classism that is crushing both poor whites and poor blacks. We currently have awful policies that merely insight racism for the advantage of politicians. Imagine if rural poor whites and urban poor blacks could see what they have in common and voted that way.
And it's exactly the political leadership in both parties that obscure what poor/working class whites and urban blacks have in common. That's why the new crop of 'anti-racists' are dangerous. For them to insist that all whites are complicit in 'white supremacy' is divisive. W.E.B. DuBois very mourned how poor white during slavery were hired by the plantation owners to oversee slaves, track down runaways, etc. So they identified with the slaveowners over race instead of identifying with freed slaves during reconstruction as exploited 'free labor' in a rising industrial nation. The ability of politicians and the business classes to keep people divided by race and ethnicity is a by-product of a multi-cultural society we live in.
You are 100% right about past unfairness. But that is not a reason to now be unfair to the relatives of those who were not treated unfairly in the past (and of course many whites were treated unfairly in the past, but for different reasons). It's just a matter of that simple truism -- two wrongs don't make a right.
If we rescue those who now need rescuing regardless of their ancestry, we will not replicate unfairness now, and we disproportionately (by a very large margin) help those whose ancestors were harmed.
Also, treating those unfairly who are needed to help solve the problem, is not the way to get things done.
Racial discrimination, either in the public or private sector, was outlawed in this country 58 years ago by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and "affirmative action" double standards giving Black applicants preference in hiring, promotion, and college admission over white applicants who are better-qualified according to the ordinary criteria of selection was first instituted by the Nixon administration in the early 1970s and subsequently expanded. Discrimination in the Jim Crow era may have had a lingering effect on Blacks born after 1964 or after the inception of affirmative action, but what percent of current US residents of Asian ancestry are descendants of people who graduated from college in the US in the late 1940s, the 1950s, or 1960s? Not a very large percent, I daresay. Yet on average, current US residents of Asian ancestry have higher average net worth than than Whites. The same was and is also true of second- and third-generation US Jews whose immigrant parents or grandparents had no college degrees.
I am afraid I disagree with this, though I wish it were so. We merely need to look at how the GI Bill after WWII helped Whites go to college but did not help Blacks. My father went to college and so did all my brothers. He was the first and we followed. Blacks were systematically excluded from southern colleges since post WWII Jim Crow was still the standard. So Blacks simply lost out on generational benefit of advanced education and consequent wealth. https://www.militarytimes.com/military-honor/salute-veterans/2019/11/10/the-gi-bill-shouldve-been-race-neutral-politicos-made-sure-it-wasnt/
The problem with this is there is still a generalization being made based on ancestry or the past. You don't have to do any generalizing at all -- you can look at the current status of people based on socioeconomics and base policy on that. If you simply generalized, you may never guess that the county with the worst male life expectancy in America around 2015 was McDowell County in West Virginia, which is overwhelmingly a white majority county. It doesn't matter a whole lot to me how people got to that status over time -- there are many forces including state sanctioned racism, yes, but other facts that led to people's current status, and we should be wary of measures that would point to the past but ignore the present.
Charles Murray makes this point splendidly in his book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. I do not disagree on this point at all. White working class America is absolutely collapsing in despair. Deaths of despair across rural white America, as Sinchan below writes, are horrifying. I live in Southwestern PA, I see it daily. My only point is race also matters. And we need policies that correct the classism that is crushing both poor whites and poor blacks. We currently have awful policies that merely insight racism for the advantage of politicians. Imagine if rural poor whites and urban poor blacks could see what they have in common and voted that way.
And it's exactly the political leadership in both parties that obscure what poor/working class whites and urban blacks have in common. That's why the new crop of 'anti-racists' are dangerous. For them to insist that all whites are complicit in 'white supremacy' is divisive. W.E.B. DuBois very mourned how poor white during slavery were hired by the plantation owners to oversee slaves, track down runaways, etc. So they identified with the slaveowners over race instead of identifying with freed slaves during reconstruction as exploited 'free labor' in a rising industrial nation. The ability of politicians and the business classes to keep people divided by race and ethnicity is a by-product of a multi-cultural society we live in.
You are 100% right about past unfairness. But that is not a reason to now be unfair to the relatives of those who were not treated unfairly in the past (and of course many whites were treated unfairly in the past, but for different reasons). It's just a matter of that simple truism -- two wrongs don't make a right.
If we rescue those who now need rescuing regardless of their ancestry, we will not replicate unfairness now, and we disproportionately (by a very large margin) help those whose ancestors were harmed.
Also, treating those unfairly who are needed to help solve the problem, is not the way to get things done.
Racial discrimination, either in the public or private sector, was outlawed in this country 58 years ago by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and "affirmative action" double standards giving Black applicants preference in hiring, promotion, and college admission over white applicants who are better-qualified according to the ordinary criteria of selection was first instituted by the Nixon administration in the early 1970s and subsequently expanded. Discrimination in the Jim Crow era may have had a lingering effect on Blacks born after 1964 or after the inception of affirmative action, but what percent of current US residents of Asian ancestry are descendants of people who graduated from college in the US in the late 1940s, the 1950s, or 1960s? Not a very large percent, I daresay. Yet on average, current US residents of Asian ancestry have higher average net worth than than Whites. The same was and is also true of second- and third-generation US Jews whose immigrant parents or grandparents had no college degrees.